The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  “Rummy, I’ve got an idea.”

  He thinks I’m joking at first. “Cut it out, Tom,” he says with a wan smile. “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. Look. This is a lovely spot and enclosed—you’d be taking no chances.” It is a lovely spot, a half acre of live oaks and pines, and even a brooklet. If it were listed by any realtor in Feliciana, it would be called a ranchette and go for at least $300,000.

  “You’ve got to be kidding—” But I see he’s taking it seriously. “How do you know they would get along. She could kill him. Eve weighs in at about 250.”

  “I have a hunch, Rummy. A strong hunch. I think it would work. To be on the safe side, we’ll watch them at first.”

  “My God.” But he’s thinking. “Let me look into the insurance.” He’s shaking his head. “No way.”

  In the end he’s convinced by a single argument: It’s his only chance to revive Eve’s language. I know his weak spot. “Don’t you see, Rummy? As Van Dorn recovers, they can communicate.”

  “How? He doesn’t know sign language, let lone Ameslan.” Ameslan is the special sign vocabulary apes are taught.

  “That’s the point,” I say, watching him. I think I’ve got him.

  “Oh. You mean—” He’s got it! His eyes are alight. “She teaches him!”

  He’s got it: she teaches him!

  “It hasn’t been done before, not even ape teaching ape, has it? Isn’t that the big breakthrough you’ve been trying for? Wouldn’t it prove your detractors wrong once and for all?”

  He’s tapping his lips, casting ahead. I’ve got him. “Why not,” he says finally. “We could put a metal hut in there in case he doesn’t take to the bower. He might even get her into the hut,” he muses.

  Why not?

  To make a long story short, he did it. They did it. Van Dorn joined Eve in her idyllic ranchette. After a good deal of wary knuckling and circling, baring of teeth, they made friends. For of course mountain gorillas, the species Gorilla gorilla, are gentle creatures despite the chest thumping and roaring, which are mainly for sexual display by males and for scaring off predators. And Van Dorn was no predator. Eve smacked her lips, a good sign. Presenting often follows. They, Eve and Van Dorn, spent the brisk fall days playing, romping about the compound, or taking long siestas in the live oak. She gave him a hand up to the crotch. On chilly nights she allowed herself to be led into the hut, which she converted to a proper bower by weaving bamboo shoots over it. They were observed signing to each other in Ameslan, the sign language of the deaf, Eve signing first, Van Dorn watching closely, then venturing a tentative sign in return.

  It lasted two months—in a word, until Van Dorn recovered. Having recovered his humanity, become his old self, his charming, grandiose, slightly phony Confederate self, he summoned Rummy Gordon in ordinary Mississippi English and expressed his desire to rejoin his own kind, was released to Sheriff Sharp, examined, found competent to stand trial, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to Angola for ten years.

  As resilient as ever, however, he was soon running the prison library, giving bridge lessons, and writing a book. My Life and Love with Eve was an immediate and sensational best seller, serialized with photos in Penthouse and eventually made into a six-hour mini-series for stereo-V, the Playboy channel. It made such a hit with the Louisiana governor that he pardoned Van Dorn, who has since been busy on the talk-show circuit and making appearances on the Donahue show, often with Dr. Ruth.

  Dr. Rumsen Gordon prospered as well. He wrote a landmark scientific paper, “The Interspecies Acquisition of Ameslan Small Talk by an Na-24 Intoxicated Homo sapiens sapiens from a Gorilla gorilla,” which became celebrated in academic circles and led to his appointment as Emeritus Professor of Semiotics at Yale at twice his former salary.

  Eve did not fare as well. Having lapsed into silence upon Van Dorn’s departure, she was returned to Zaire, where it was hoped she would be accepted by other mountain gorillas, who, however, were members of an endangered species on the verge of extinction. She was last seen squatting alone on a riverbank, shunned by man and gorilla alike.

  4. BOB COMEAUX AND MAX AND I reached a gentleman’s agreement. Instead of turning Bob over to the Justice Department for prosecution for defrauding the federal government, specifically in his misuse of both discretionary NIH funds and Ford Foundation grants, we suggested that it might be in his interest to stay long enough to dismantle the sodium shunt and to divert next year’s funds to St. Margaret’s Hospice—and then to leave town. Max, who knows everybody, made friendly telephone calls to the directors of both NIH and ACMUI and let drop not even a hint but only an intimation that even though they were not legally responsible for the Blue Boy pilot, it might be prudent—politics being politics, and we know about politicians, right, Doctors?—not only to dismantle the sodium shunt for environmental reasons but to terminate the local Qualitar?an Center at Fedville—for fiscal reasons.

  The center was closed, quietly. Bob Comeaux left town even more quietly. I have not heard from him. There are rumors. Some say that he returned to Long Island City, resumed the family name Como—Huguenots being in short supply in Queens—and is running a Planned Parenthood clinic on Queens Boulevard.

  He bears me no malice. In fact, the last time I saw him, in the A&P parking lot, where he’d had to park to get to the post office because his Mercedes was pulling a two-horse trailer, he greeted me in his old style, with knowing looks right and left as if he meant to share a secret. The secret was that he’d been invited to the People’s Republic of China to serve as consultant to the minister for family planning, who wanted to enlist his expertise in the humane disposal of newborn second children—Chinese families being limited, as everyone knows, to one child.

  “You want to know something, old buddy,” says Bob Comeaux, hitching up his pants, hiking one foot on the bumper of the horse trailer just below the long gray tails of two splendid Arabians. He hawks and spits, adjusts his crotch, casting an eye about, Louisiana style.

  “What?”

  “You and I may have had our little disagreements, like Churchill and Roosevelt, but we were always after the same thing.”

  “We were?”

  “Sure. Helping folks. Our disagreement was in tactics, not goals.”

  “It was?”

  “You always did have a genius for the one-on-one doctor-patient relationship—for helping the individual—and you were right—especially about Van Dorn and that gang of fags and child abusers—for which I salute you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But I was right about the long haul, the ultimate goal, as you must admit.”

  “I must?”

  “We were after the same thing, the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number. We were not a bad team, Tom. Between us we had it all. We each supplied the other’s defect.”

  “We did?”

  “Sure.” He pats the round rump of an Arabian, and his eyes go fond and unfocused. “We’ve never argued about the one great medical goal we shared. And you still can’t argue.” His eyes almost come back to mine.

  “About what?”

  “Argue with the proposition that in the end there is no reason to allow a single child to suffer needlessly, a single old person to linger in pain, a single retard to soil himself for fifty years, suffer humiliation, and wreck his family.”

  “I—”

  “You want to know the truth,” he says suddenly, giving me a sly sideways look.

  “Yes.”

  “You and I are more alike than most folks think.”

  “We are?”

  “Sure—and you damn well know it. The only difference between us is that you’re the proper Southern gent who knows how to act and I’m the low-class Yankee who does all these bad things like killing innocent babies and messing with your Southern Way of Life by putting secret stuff in the water, right? What people don’t know but what you and I know is that we’re both after the same thing—such as reducing the s
uffering in the world and making criminals behave themselves. And here’s the thing, old buddy”—he is smiling, coming close, but his eyes are narrow—“and you know it and I know it: You can’t give me one good reason why what I am doing is wrong. The only difference between us is that you’re in good taste and I’m not. You have style and know how to act, and I don’t. But you don’t have one good reason—” He breaks off, hawks, eyes going away in his new-found Southern style. He smiles. “You all right, Doc.”

  “I—” I begin, but he’s gone.

  5. TWO GREAT HAPPENINGS to Lucy Lipscomb within the month. Exxon brought in a gas well at Pantherburn and her ex-husband, Buddy Dupre, divorced his second wife and came home.

  Acquitted of charges of grand theft and malfeasance in office by the Baton Rouge grand jury, mostly Cajuns, he returned to Feliciana exonerated and something of a hero. He is said to have political ambitions. Many friends, he reports, have urged him to seek higher office. What with his extended family—he’s kin to half of south Louisiana—and Lucy’s high-Protestant connections in Feliciana and his own advocacy of a “scientific creationism” law in the legislature—which helped him in Baptist north Louisiana—he has a political base broad enough to run for governor. And now Lucy has the money. Louisianians, moreover, have a fondness for politicians who beat a rap: “Didn’t I tell you that ol’ boy was too damn smart to catch up with?”

  Lucy, to tell the truth, would not in the least mind being first lady of Louisiana and presiding over the great mansion in Baton Rouge. She is one of those women who can carry off being wife, doctoring, and running a plantation—doing it all well, albeit somewhat abstractedly.

  It is just as well. I’d have gotten into trouble with Lucy for sure, lovely as she is in her bossy-nurturing, mothering-daughtering way, always going tch and fixing something on me, brushing off dandruff with quick rough brushes of her hand, spitting on her thumb to smooth my eyebrows. The one time she came to my bed, coming somewhat over and onto me in an odd, agreeable, early-morning incubus centering movement, I registered, along with the pleasant centered weight of her, the inkling that she was the sort who likes the upper hand.

  It is just as well Ellen came home and Buddy came home. She, Lucy, gave signs of wanting to marry me, and how could I not have, lovely large splendid big-assed girl that she is, face as bruisy-ripe as a plum, with a splendid old house and Ellen having run off with Van Dorn? An unrelieved disaster it would have been, what with the uncle calling ducks night and day and what with Ellen coming home eventually. I’d have ended up for sure like our common ancestor, Lucy’s and mine, with one wife too many in a great old house, sunk in English Tory melancholy, nourishing paranoid suspicions against his neighbors, fearful of crazy Yankee Americans coming down the river (Como and company) and depraved French coming up the river (Buddy Dupre and the Cajuns)—in the end seeing no way out but to tie a sugar kettle on his head and jump into the river.

  What a relief all around.

  Lucy deserved her good fortune, restored Pantherburn without prettying it up, replaced rotten joists and moldings, hung her English landscapes for the first time since the War, replaced the silver stolen by the Yankees and General Benjamin F. “Silver Spoons” Butler.

  Vergil Bon was toolpusher for the Exxon well, and made enough money to return to L.S.U. for his graduate degree in petroleum geology.

  The uncle won the Arkansas National Duck Call for the eleventh time.

  6. THE EFFECTS OF the heavy-sodium additive are gradually wearing off in Feliciana.

  In the universities, for example, one sees fewer students lying about the campus grooming each other.

  There are fewer complaints from parents about “human fly” professors scaling the walls of the women’s dormitories. Fewer professors complain of women students presenting rearward during tutorials.

  L.S.U. football had a losing season.

  Writers-in-residence, as well as local poets who for years have been writing two-word sentences like the chimp Washoe and during readings uttering exclamations, howls, and routinely exposing themselves, have begun writing understandable novels and genuine poetry in the style of Robert Penn Warren, formerly of Feliciana.

  But my practice is still dormant. Still, no one complains of depression, anxiety, guilt, obsessions, or phobias. People hereabouts still suffer from physical illnesses, mainly liver damage and arterial clogging, but, mentally speaking, appear to have subsided into a pleasant funk, saying very little, drinking Dixie beer, fishing, hunting, watching sports on stereo-V, eating crawfish and sucking the heads thoughtfully.

  I report this state of affairs to Leroy Ledbetter at the Little Napoleon over a drink of Early Times. Taking his invisible drink during a wipe, he replies only, “So what else is new, Doc?”

  7. MY TWO OLD FRIENDS, ex-Jesuit Kev Kevin and ex Maryknoller Debbie Boudreaux, who had long since abandoned belief in God, Jesus, the Devil, the Church, and suchlike in favor of belief in community, relevance, growth, and interpersonal relations, have now abandoned these beliefs as well.

  They went their separate ways.

  Debbie works quietly as full-time bookkeeper at her father’s new Nissan agency in Thibodaux.

  Kev has given up writing political tracts and now writes commercially successful paperback novels about nuns and ex-nuns, priests and ex-priests who engage in a variety of political and sexual activities, both heterosexual and homosexual, gay and lesbian, Marxist and Fascist.

  We remain friends. They are in fact quite solicitous of me and my troubles. They call regularly. In turn I call on them to help me out at the hospice. I need them. They are good. They willingly volunteer and often spend a day with me in the AIDS wing or the Alzheimer’s pavilion. All you have to do, I discover, is ask people. They do it because they’re generous and, I think, a bit lonely. I work with them because I need their help and I’ve nothing better to do. In return, I give them couple’s counseling, no charge. They might get back together.

  8. CHANDRA IS A BIG SUCCESS on local stereo-V. She didn’t make anchorperson as she had hoped, but eventually did become weatherperson, where she was an immediate hit, her pert manner and general sassiness contrasting with the bland Indiana style of the other members of “NewsTeam-7.” She became a “personality”—”Watch Chan on Channel 7” went the promo.

  During the minute or so of happy talk at the end of a newscast, when other members of NewsTeam-7 are smiling and making pleasantries and semi-jokes as they stack their papers, Chandra will have none of it: no grins, no banter. Instead, she often challenges the anchorman: “What you talking about, have a nice day—what’s nice about that?”—socking the weather map with her pointer.

  9. WHILE I WAS TALKING to Bob Comeaux and Max Gottlieb in my cell at Angola, I asked the former casually what drugs they used in the pedeuthanasia program at the Qualitarian Life Center. He answered as casually, without thinking about it, as one doctor to another, “Amobarbital and secobarbital, IV.”

  “That’s peaceful, isn’t it?”

  “They go to sleep like the babies they are.”

  “How about the adults?”

  “Secobarbital IV and”—he rouses, showing interest—“do you know what I hit on more or less by accident and what is now state of the art?”

  “No.”

  “Secobarbital plus THC.”

  “THC?”

  “You know, tetrahydrocannabinol, the active constituent of marijuana—and you want to know something, Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is an exaltation, a joyousness, a sense of acceptance and affirmation you would have to see to believe.”

  “I believe you.”

  Max Gottlieb is frowning uneasily and moving toward the door. Bob detains him.

  “I don’t mind telling you guys that for the first time we have actually achieved the full meaning of the Greek word eu in euthanasia. Eu means good. I may be simpleminded, but I think good is better than bad, serenity better than suffering. You know what you ou
ght to do, Tom?”

  “What?”

  “You ought to tell Father Smith about THC.”

  “I will.”

  “I mean as a therapeutic agent.”

  “I understand.”

  He looks at me curiously. “Why is your friend Father Smith so dead set against us?”

  After a pause—actually I don’t know how to answer him—I think of an answer which might also satisfy my own curiosity. “He thinks you’ll end by killing Jews.”

  “What’s that?” Bob asks sharply; then, for some reason, also asks Max, “What’s that? What do you mean?”

  Both Bob and Max are embarrassed, Bob for me and Father Smith—I’ve exposed his nuttiness. Max is embarrassed because he is one of those Southern Jews who are embarrassed by the word Jew.

  “What does he mean?” asks Bob, opening his hands to both of us.

  Max, frowning, is having none of it.

  “Tom?” asks Bob Comeaux.

  I shrug. “He claims it will eventually end as it did with the Germans, starting out with euthanasia for justifiable medical, psychiatric, and economic reasons. But in the end the majority always gets in trouble, needs a scapegoat, and gets rid of an unsubsumable minority.”

  “Unsubsumable?” asks Max, who, I think, wouldn’t mind being subsumable.

  “Unsubsumable.”

  Bob Comeaux is shaking his head mournfully. “Ah me. I thought I had heard it all. Sorry I asked. Does he think I’m anti-Semitic, for God’s sake?”

  “No.”

  “Let me tell you something, Tom. I mean, hear this, loud and clear, Doctor!” He is standing arrow-straight, hat held over his heart, addressing me, but for Max’s benefit. “Some of my very dearest friends—”